...Esin Düzel Kurdish Life in Contemporary Turkey: Migration, Gender, and Ethnic Identity Grabolle-Çeliker Anna London : Tauris , 2013 299 pages. isbn 978-1-78076-092-6 Copyright © 2015 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 2015 Anna Grabolle-Çeliker’s Kurdish...

... Protection Units (Kurdish, Yekîneyên Parastina Jinê; YPJ) and the women’s military wing of the PKK, Yekîneyên Jinên Azad ên Star (YJA-Star), have challenged traditional gender roles and contributed to the idea of “democratic confederalism,” a term the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan coined to highlight a move...

... in Istanbul whose sons were deployed to the conflict zone and returned home without any injuries, this article examines how the conflict has impacted the mothers’ perception of national service, of the Kurdish conflict, and of the “East.” I argue that the women start to partly question the obligation...

...Nadje Al-Ali; Latif Tas Abstract Despite the recent outbreak of violence and conflict, peace continues to be high on the agenda of the Kurdish political movement and many progressive Turkish intellectuals and activists. Based on qualitative research we conducted in Diyarbakır, Istanbul, London, and...

...Sharon Linzey Copyright © 2007 Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 2007 BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS  103 International Conference on Kurdish Women for Peace and Equality, March 8, 2007, Erbil, Southern Kurdistan Sharon...

...Nadeen El-Kassem Copyright © 2007 Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 2007 BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS  105 dom, traditional Kurdish dance, and the great desire for a home state. Numerous Kurdish handicrafts were also on display and available for...

...Shahrzad Mojab; Rachel Gorman In this paper we provide an analysis of Kurdish women’s organizing in the diaspora, highlighting the tension between “homeland” and “host-land” nationalisms, patriarchy, and feminism. This is the first feminist-transnational study of the experience of Kurdish women...

...Andrea Fischer-Tahir In 1988 the Iraqi regime launched the Anfal campaigns against the Kurdish peshmerga and their civil supporters in the rural areas. This article investigates narrations about Anfal constructed by peshmerga ten years after the events. It compares the memoirs of a leading...

...Marlene Schäfers Abstract Women’s rights and human rights projects in Turkey and elsewhere routinely construe and celebrate subaltern voice as an index of individual and collective empowerment. Through an ethnographic study of Kurdish women singers’ ( dengbêj s) efforts to engage in their...

...Karin Mlodoch This article focuses on Kurdish women in Iraq who survived the Iraqi army’s Anfal operations against the Kurdish areas in 1988. It investigates Iraqi Kurdish women’s psychosocial situation and strategies for coping with violence and loss in the aftermath of the Anfal operations. These...

...Edith Szanto Abstract During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of...

... Nina Laven, University of Michigan Most recent ethnographic studies of Kurdish populations have, out of necessity, focused on the dynamics of Kurdish diasporic identities in Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Georgia, and other countries outside of the re- gion known as Kurdistan (Mingle 2003; Saatci...

... was committed to Özal’s economic and political policies. The AKP won the general election in 2002, tolerated by nearly every segment of society, including the Kurdish and Turkish oppositions and liberal-leftist intellectuals. In 2007 and 2010 the party expanded its powers by referendum, and in 2010...

... tanks. Such acts of violence were appalling and unfathomable for the nation, except for the Kurdish region, where state violence had long gained an ordinary character. Yet, for large sectors of Turkish society, some of the most disturbing spectacles of the coup night were the grotesque scenes of...

... revolutions. Analyzing the coverage of Arab and Kurdish women’s participation in the Syrian turmoil, Szanto questions the stakes of Anglophone media in representing women as victims, heroines, or pawns, arguing that this typology masks as much as it reveals. Tadros turns our attention away from Egyptian women...

..., xxii + 405 pp Nina Laven, University of Michigan Most recent ethnographic studies of Kurdish populations have, out of necessity, focused on the dynamics of Kurdish diasporic identities in Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Georgia, and other countries outside of the re- gion known as...

... ); on the other, spaces of violence can become embodied spaces of solidarity that shift the political playing field. For Al-Ali and Tas, as conflict escalates against Kurdish regions, Turkish and Kurdish feminist academics’ and activists’ positions draw closer. Thus “Kurdish peace activists have...

... 2003 by the European Centre for Kurdish Studies in Berlin. Her monograph, Brave men, pretty women? Gender and symbolic violence in Kurdish urban so- ciety (2009) was translated into Kurdish and published in Sulaimaniya in 2011. In Iraqi Kurdistan, Fischer-Tahir worked in the sector...

... literature and television, and a third looks at the role of the “beloved” in the reception of Kurdish Sufi poetry. That article anticipates JMEWS 12:2, our next special issue, which is devoted to intimacy in the Middle East. ...

... (in Turkish) and the latter at their office in Aksaray (in Turkish and Kurdish). I also interviewed twenty members of the Mothers of Soldiers at Edirnekapı Martyr’s Cemetery and at the Associations for Veterans and Martyrs’ Families in Fatih and Mecidiyeköy. Friedrich Nietzsche’s insistence on...